Apple Will Sell At Least 10 Million Verizon iPhones The First Year

At least 10 million iPhones in the first year, we estimate, generating $6 billion or more of incremental revenue for Apple.

That's big growth -- more than we think many people are expecting -- and well worth the cost of making a second version of the iPhone that works on Verizon's network. And it will probably reduce Google's Android market share in the U.S., a win-win for Apple.

How did we figure that?

AT&T activated about 14 million new iPhones over the past four quarters on a subscriber base that's now a little more than 90 million. (Of those activations, about 10 million were by existing AT&T subscribers.)

Verizon's subscriber base is also about 90 million, and we don't expect iPhone adoption to be wildly different on Verizon than it has been on AT&T. Maybe somewhat less, because Verizon folks already have high-end Android phones, but not much less.

For perspective, if Apple were to have sold 10 million incremental iPhones over the past four quarters, that would have represented around 25% growth over its roughly 40 million shipments during that time.